Water 24×7 is not just a pipe dream….Johnson T A
3 karnataka cities show the way, Mysore becomes first to contract a private water distributor
During debates on the merits of bringing in private water experts to distribute drinking water to homes in urban India 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, one story is often repeated.
It is the story of a woman, a daily wage earner from Hubli-Dharwad, tier-II twin towns in north Karnataka that received two hours of water supply every 15 days in the summer of 2002. In 2010, following a World Bank-funded experiment to supply water 24×7 to 5,000 homes in the region, she told government experts that she saved Rs. 400 per month when supply was continuous.
Prior to the experiment, she had to take a day off from work every week to keep in tune with the water release schedule. Continuous supply meant the family did not have to forfeit daily wages waiting for water. A Rs. 48 per month minimum tariff for the poor was a boon and not a burden, she said.
Four cities in the state are now chasing the 24×7 dream.
Northern demo
In April 2008, five experimental zones in the northern cities of Hubli-Dharwad, Gulbarga and Belgaum, comprising 25,056 homes, began receiving 24×7 metered supply through a Rs. 237-crore World Bank project bagged by Veolia Water India, the Indian entity of a French giant.
The government strategy was to get the private experts to re-engineer the system, run operations for a period, and then hand it over to the Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Board to take it forward.
Last year, at the end of the demonstration, people across the board showed a willingness to pay for efficient services while the municipal corporations in the three cities began demanding extension of the project to their entire populace.
The government is now searching for a viable public-private partnership for a project valued at Rs. 700 crore to recast the distribution network in the three cities.
“The challenge is to standardise cost. Without guaranteed supply there is no way to understand what costs are justifiable,” says Arvind Srivastava, managing director of the Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation, nodal agency for much of the experimentation.
Southern stride
The southern city of Mysore, with more assured sources of daily supply, has meanwhile nudged ahead to become the country’s first to award a private player a contract to distribute water across a city. The Tata-owned Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company bagged a Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission-funded project in December 2008 to supply water to 1.74 lakh people. Till February end, the project was providing water to 10,100 homes.
Public, private
Activists argue 24×7 supply is a means to privatising the water sector; the government maintains private players are only contractors while existing boards are in charge of the main supply and tariff collection. “If we have to provide quality service we have to be ready for the participation of others as a support,” said Urban Development Minister S Suresh Kumar.
A financially sustainable model involving private players is, however, yet to be worked out. “Capital costs are high; this will not work if private parties have to bring in all the funds. The government is trying to work out a PPP model where private parties also bring in funds,” says an expert in the sector.
Why 24×7
According to Mysore city commissioner K S Raikar, the city plumped for continuous water supply since the practice “with required pressure in the distribution network is recognised as a safe method and is accepted all over the world”.
“The water pumped to Mysore from primary sources is 185 million litres a day. At a consumption of 120 MLD there should be at least 65 million litres remaining everyday but this is lost in distribution. New pipeline systems minimise these losses. A 24×7 system will use the same amount, or even less, than a once-a-day system,” says an official at JUSCO.
“Till we started demonstrating in Hubli-Dharwad in 2008, everybody was saying it is impossible to provide drinking water 24×7. Customers were surprised when water began flowing in their taps,” says Veolia India’s senior manager M J R Chowdary.
Work to do
The supply system even in areas connected by JUSCO is not streamlined. “What 24×7 supply? It comes only twice a day for a few hours. The water board-managed system was better because we knew what time the water would come,” says Dr Shailaja who lives on the top floor at Saraswathipuram.
At the bottom floor, homemaker Rukmini says, “It is not exactly 24×7, it is more like 18 or 19×7 but the quality of water is consistent, the pressure enough to fill the tanks on the second floor.”
JUSCO officials admit that there are teething problems, issues with the Vani Vilas Water Works — the local water board whose employees feel threatened—- as well as an underestimation of the project cost. “But we have been able to get the project going,” says a JUSCO official.